Last weekend, led by Dr. Meg Schwamb (who is part of the Planet Hunters and Planet Four teams), a team of Taiwanese astronomers helped introduced a Chinese (Mandarin) version a Galaxy Zoo to the public on the Open House Day of Academia Sinica, the highest academic institution in Taiwan.

A big crowd of enthusiastic students and parents, attracted by the long queue itself, visited the ‘Citizen Science: Galaxy Zoo’ booth to try the project hands-on by doing galaxy classifications. They were excited to participate in scientific research and enjoyed it very much.

“Amazing! In just two minutes, we have helped astronomer doing their research, it’s so cool! Also, we learn new astronomical facts we never knew before. It’s a good show.”

The Education Public Outreach team of Academia Sinica’s Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics (a.k.a. “ASIAA”), has helped translated Galaxy Zoo from English to Chinese (Mandarin). The main translator, Lauren Huang said, “we were keen to do a localized version for Galaxy Zoo since 2010, so when Meg brought up this nice idea again, we acted upon it at once.” In less than six weeks, it was done. The other translator, Chun-Hui, Yang, who contributed to the translation, said that she likes the website’s sleek design very much. “I think the honor is ours, to take part in such a well-designed global team work!” Lauren said.

Talking about the translation process process, Lauren provided an anecdote that she thought about giving “zoo” a very local name, such as “Daguanyuan” (“Grand View Garden”), a term with authentic Chinese cultural flavour, and is from classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber. She said, “because, my personal experience in browsing the Galaxy Zoo website has been very much just like the character Ganny Liu in the classics novel. Imagine, if one flew into the virtual image database of the universe, which contains all sorts of hidden treasures waiting to be explored, what a privilege, and how little we can offer, to help on such a grandeur design?” However, the zoo is still translated as “Dungwuyuan”, literally, just as “zoo “. Because that’s what some Chinese bloggers have already accustomed to, creating a different term might just be too confusing.

Not too long ago we announced that Galaxy Zoo has gone open source – along with several other Zooniverse projects. Part of that announcement was that it is now possible for anyone to translate the Galaxy Zoo website into their own language and have that pulled back into the main site. We love translation at the Zooniverse! Using GitHub (our code repository) means we can open up the translation process to everyone.

Clone the app locally from GitHub and run the translate.rb file in root

If step 1 doesn’t make any sense then contact rob@zooniverse.org and we can create the file for you.

These JSON files are tree structures of strings in “key”: “value” pairs that contain all the translatable text on Galaxy Zoo. You need to translate just the values , which are the parts after the colon (:) shown in bold in the example chunk of the file below.

You do not translate the parts before the colon as these are the keys that are used to identify each string. so in the example you do not translate “zooniverse”, “browser_check”, “won’t_work, “recommended”, “ie”, “chrome_frame” or “dismiss”. Here’s the Spanish version of the above segment of the file:

Note that any quotation marks need to be escaped i.e. ” becomes \” – these files have to be valid JSON and there is a handy online tool for validating this at http://jsonlint.com/ – here you can paste in the whole file and it will tell you where there are any formatting errors if you have any.

There is very little scope for doing language-specific formatting on the website. This means that if text is too long when it’s been translated it may run off the page or be cut-off on the screen. Because of this, you need to keep the translated strings to approximately the same length. If this causes issues let us know. To test out the translation and see how it looks, which you’re welcome to do ant any time, you can either email your current file to rob@zooniverse.org or run the Galaxy Zoo app locally by cloning it from GitHub (https://github.com/zooniverse/Galaxy-Zoo/).

We also have an email list for Zooniverse Translators. If you’d like to join it in order to ask questions of other translators and hear about other projects you might want to translate then email rob@zooniverse.org. If you are planning on doing a translation it would be worth joining the list to coordinate with other translators in your language.

When your translation is complete will find find an astronomer somewhere in the world who speaks your language, in order to double-check (peer-review!) the new text and give feedback. This is done to ensure that the site is still conveying the original meaning and acts as a good error-checking mechanism.

Good luck with your translation, and thank you! Hopefully we can open up Galaxy Zoo to many more people around the world.

I was also interviewed for “Amateur Astronomer” (a Chinese astronomy magazine). Here’s the first page of the article they sent me.

And a photo they took of me right after giving my talk when they gave me the previous edition of the magazine.

I also talked with someone from Southern Weekly (a Chinese newspaper with a readership of 8 million), who published this article (in Chinese).

Finally I talked with people from China Radio International, who said they planned to run the story, but I’m not sure what came of that yet. They recorded me saying “Xin Xi Zong Dong Yuan” (our Chinese translation of “Galaxy Zoo”), and explaining (in English) what Galaxy Zoo is.

Galaxy Zoo: Hubble is now available in German! The likes of Johannes Kepler, Heinrich Olbers, Joseph von Fraunhofer and Max Planck would all no doubt be very pleased, as we’re sure they would have loved Galaxy Zoo!*

German is one of the most important cultural languages in the world. Many famous figures, such as Beethoven, Freud, Goethe, Mozart and Einstein spoke and wrote in German. It is the language of around 100 million people worldwide, not just in Germany, but in Austria, a large part of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the South Tyrol region of Italy, parts of Belgium, parts of Romania and in the Alsace region of France.

We have just started the Polish version of the Galaxy Zoo Hubble! To get to it, hover your mouse over the small flag icon in the upper left corner of the main page. It has been a major effort. Not only new sections added for Hubble have been translated, but the whole Polish text has been carefully revised.

We think, however, that it was every bit worth the effort! Galaxy Zoo is very popular in Poland and Hubble data opens completely new doors to the Universe, so we are very happy to open them a bit wider by providing the Polish language version :).